What is a Healthy Perspective?

What one person experiences as a ‘terrible day’ could easily be a ‘dream come true’ for another.

The saying ‘one man’s junk is another man’s treasure’ highlights an important truth about evaluation: the difference between ‘junk’ and ‘treasure’ is based more on perspective than objective fact. Parents wanting to clean their house have good reasons to throw away comic books…while children hoping to build a valuable collection have equally good reasons to save the piles.

I find this same dynamic at work when we evaluate our lives. One person’s ‘terrible day’ could be what another would consider a ‘dream come true.’ For me personally, I now fondly remember some days that were at the time experienced as miserable. The difference between the experienced misery and my nostalgic memories is in my changed perspective.

The fact that something in my own head--my perspective--can change an evaluative conclusion from ‘miserable’ to ‘fond memory’ is a problem for my evaluative aspirations. I’d like to think of my evaluative judgments as stable, or at the very least not fully reversible. And yet as an evaluator I need to accept the data pointing toward this reality. Now that I see the fluidity of my perspective in opposition to stable evaluative judgment, my new questions are: is there a ‘best’ or ‘healthy’ perspective, and if so, how would I know? I’ll keep wrestling with this, but let me know if you have any ideas!